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SEO

Search engine optimisation is a pretty big deal in the industry. That’s unsurprising considering that SEO determines how high up your website is in search engine result listings when someone searches for a subject related to your website. Anyone who wants their website to get traffic/ be seen (which is pretty much everybody) will want their site to be optimised and easy to be discovered. So here’s how it works:

On-page optimisations:

Actual text: the textual content of your site is looked at by search engines as a basis for searches. So try to put relevant keywords in your site’s content.

HTML: the html files and links needs to be named appropriately as browsers look at that as well so no page1.html or any other generic rubbish.

Title: the title on your page (in one of the title tag) is as looked at by search engines also if you put hn tags around the headings on your page then the SE will take even more notice as it uses that to gauge what your website is about.

Alt text: adding alt text (description that comes up when your image fails to display on a browser) to your images are important as they’re what puts your image on the search index in image searches. Again no generic descriptions such as this is an image please.

Quality: you may think that is far too beyond search engines to determine the quality of your website. Well your wrong if you think that. One way search engines measure quality is to see if users will ‘bounce’ (click back to search results to try another page) from your website if they either don’t find it interest or relevant. So appropriate, engaging content and aesthetics suddenly become a crucial factor thanks to this SE feature. Clever, aren’t they?

Here’s a visual (albeit crudely drawn) representation of the above text if you’re intimidated by all the words:

Off-page optimisation:

Links: how many other sites link to your site also help determine your page content. But SEs don’t just look at how many pages link to you, they see if the content of the sites linking to you have related content. So if a beauty salon linked to your gaming website it probably won’t have as much of an impact to your page ranking as a website that linked to you that is also about gaming.

Social media: social media links/references to your site has become more and more important to website’s page ranking as well. So set up social accounts and make them popular!

Warning: Please don’t create a thousand fake accounts. Whilst SEs can’t check if something is fake or not it can see if one account has poor reputation (i.e. no followers). Plus you don’t want to confuse consumers would you?

Other tips:

Spelling, spelling, spelling. If you spell things wrong not only would it annoy viewers it’ll make your content irrelevant and thus pushing it down the page rankings.

No cloaking (hiding keywords by making them the same colour as the background, cheeky!) search engines (well Google) will penalise you for it.

For those who are scared of a post that’s filled with just words. This’ll be the last time I do this or it’ll just kill me.